Stalking the Nightmare

Harlan Ellison

Foreword by Stephen King

Introduction: QUIET LIES THE LOCUST TELLS

GRAIL

THE OUTPOST UNDISCOVERED BY TOURISTS

BLANK…

Scenes From The Real World: I

VISIONARY (written with Joe L. Hensley)

DJINN, NO CHASER

INVASION FOOTNOTE

Scenes From The Real World: II

NIGHT OF BLACK GLASS

FINAL TROPHY

!! !THE! !TEDDY!CRAZY! !SHOW!!!

THE CHEESE STANDS ALONE

Scenes From The Real World: III

TRANSCENDING DESTINY

THE HOUR THAT STRETCHES

THE DAY I DIED

3 Tales From the Mountains of Madness:

TRACKING LEVEL

TINY ALLY

THE GODDESS IN THE ICE

Scenes From The Real World: IV

In every possible way this book is for

(Ms.) MARTY CLARK

I don’t have much patience with the facts, and any writer is a congenital liar to begin with or he wouldn’t take up writing … I write to say No to death … an artist is a creature driven by demons. He don’t usually know why they chose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why …

—William Faulkner

STEPHEN KING

It drives my wife crazy, and I’m sorry it does, but I can’t really help it.

All the little sayings and homilies.

Such as: There’s a heartbeat in every potato; you need that like a hen needs a flag; I’d trust him about as far as I could sling a piano; use it up, wear it out, do it in, or do without; you’ll never be hung for your beauty; fools’ names, and their faces, are often seen in public places.

I could go on and on. I got a million of ‘em. I got them all from my mother, who got them all from
her
mother. Little kernels of wisdom. Cosmic fortune-cookies, if you like.

They drive my wife absolutely BUGFUCK.

“But honey,” I’ll say in my best placatory voice (I’m a very placatory fellow, when I’m not writing about vampires and psychotic killers), “there’s a lot of truth in those sayings. There really
is
a heartbeat in every potato. The proof of the pudding really
is
in the eating. And handsome really is as—” But I can see that it would be foolish to continue. My wife, who can be extremely rude when it serves her purpose, is pretending to throw up. My four-year-old son walks in from the shower, naked, dripping water all over the floor and the bed
(my
side of the bed, of course), and also begins to make throwing-up noises.

She is obviously teaching him to hate me and revile me. It’s probably all Oedipal and sexual and neo-Jungian and dirty as hell.

But I have the last laugh.

Two days later, while this self-same kid is debating which card to throw away in a hot game of Crazy Eights, my nine-year-old son tells him, “Let me look at your hand, Owen. I’ll tell you which card to throw away.”

Owen looks at him coldly. Calculatingly. Pulls his cards slowly against his chest. And with a humorless grin he says: “Joey, I’d trust you just about as far as I’d spring a piano.”

My wife begins to scream and roll around on the floor, foaming, pulling her hair out in great clots, drumming her heels, crying out: “I WANT A DIVORCE! THIS MAN HAS CORRUPTED MY CHILDREN AND I WANT A FUCKING DIVORCE!”

My heart glows with the warmth of fulfillment (or maybe it’s just acid indigestion). My mother’s homilies have slipped into the minds of yet another generation, just as chemical waste has a way of seeping into the water-table. I think:
Ah-hah-hah-hah! Another triumph for us bog-cutters! Long live the Irish!

Another of this wonderful woman’s wonderful sayings (I told you—I got a million of ‘em; don’t make me prove it) was “Milk always takes the flavor of what’s next to it in the icebox.” Not a very useful saying, you might think, but I suspect it’s not only the reason I’m writing this introduction, but the reason I’m writing it the
way
I’m writing it.

Does it sound like Harlan wrote it?

It does?

That’s because I just finished the admirable book which follows. For the last four days I have been, so to speak, sitting next to Harlan in the icebox. I am not copying his style; nothing as low as that. I have, rather, taken a brief
impression
of his style, the way that, when we were kids, we used to be able to take a brief impression of Beetle Bailey or Blondie from the Sunday funnies with a piece of Silly Putty (headline in the
New York Times Book Review:
KING OFFERS EERILY APT METAPHOR FOR HIS OWN MIND!!).

How do I know this is what has happened? I know because I have been writing hard for about twenty-five years now—which means (as Harlan, or Ray Bradbury, or John Crowley, or any other writer worth his or her salt will tell you) that I have also been
reading
hard. The two go together. I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they “don’t have time to read.” This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he “didn’t have time to buy any rope or pitons.”

And part of the dues you pay while you’re doing this hard reading, particularly if you start your period of hard writing as a teenager (as most of us did—God knows there are exceptions, but not many), is that you find yourself writing like whoever you’re reading that week. If you’re reading
RED NAILS,
your current short story sounds like that old Hyborian Cowboy, Robert E. Howard. If you’ve been reading
FAREWELL, MY LOVELY,
your stuff sounds like Raymond Chandler. You’re milk, and you taste like whatever was next to you in the refrigerator that week.

But this is where the metaphor breaks down … or where it ought to. If it doesn’t, you’re in serious trouble. Because a writer isn’t a carton of milk—or at least he or she shouldn’t be. Because a writer shouldn’t continue to take the flavors of the people he or she is currently reading. Because a writer who doesn’t start sounding like himself sooner or later really isn’t much of a writer at all; he’s a ventriloquist’s dummy. But take heart—little by little, that voice usually comes out. It’s not easy, and it’s not quick (that’s one of the reasons that so many people who talk about writing books never do), but there comes a day when you look back on the stuff you wrote when you were seventeen … or twenty-two … or twenty-eight… and say to yourself,
Good God! If I was this bad, how did I ever get any better?

They don’t call that stuff “juvenilia” for nothing, friends’n neighbors.

The imitativeness shakes out, and we become ourselves again.
But.
One never seems to develop an immunity to some writers … or at least I never have. Their ranks are small, but their influence—at least on this here New England white boy—has been profound. When I go back to them, I can’t
not
imitate them. My letters start sounding like them; my short stories; a chunk of whatever novel I’m working on, maybe; even grocery lists.

Lovecraft. Raymond Chandler (and, at second hand, Ross Macdonald and Robert Parker). Dorothy Sayers, who wrote the clearest, most lucid prose of our century. Peter Straub.

And Ellison.

That’s really where it hews to the bone, I guess. When you take it right back down home, you come to this: the man is a ferociously talented writer, ferociously in love with the job of writing stories and essays, ferociously dedicated to the craft of it as well as its art—the latter being the part of the job with which writers who have been to college most frequently excuse laziness, sloppiness, cant, and promiscuous self-indulgence.

There are folks in the biz who don’t like Harlan much. I don’t think I’m telling you anything you don’t know; if you know Phantasia Press, whose imprint this book bears, then you probably know enough about speculative fiction to know that. These anti-Harlan folks offer any number of reasons for their dislike, but I believe that a lot of it has to do with that ferocity. Harlan is the sort of guy who makes an ordinary writer feel like a dilletante, and an ordinary liver (i.e., one who lives, not a bodily organ which will develop cirrhosis if you pour too much booze over it) feel like a spinster librarian who once got kissed on the Fourth of July.

Coupled with the ferocity of purpose is a crazed confidence—the confidence of a man who does not just walk wires but runs across them full-tilt-boogie. There are folks who find this trait equally unendearing. People who are afraid don’t like people who are brave. People who eat pallidly and politely at the Great Banquet of Life (Chew that fish—there might be a bone in it! Skip the beef —if you eat enough of it, you get cancer of the bowel! No eggs-cholesterol! Heart attacks! Eat the carrots. Eat the carrots. They’re safe. Boring, but safe.) resent people who dash wildly up and down, trying some of this, scarfing up some of that, swallowing something really
gruesome
and barfing it back up.

Put another way, Harlan knows now—and has, I would guess, since about 1965—that if you’re gonna talk that talk, you gotta be able to walk that walk; that if you got the flash you better have the cash, and that sooner or later you gotta put up or shut up. He rides the Shockwave.

All of this comes through admirably in the man’s fiction and essays (as it damn well should; otherwise his impact would die with him), and I think that’s the reason I always end up writing like the guy after I’ve been reading the guy. It’s the force of his personality, the sense of Harlan Ellison
as a living person
that’s caught in the lines. There are people who don’t like that; there are many people who are convinced that Harlan is some sort of trick, like that miniature guillotine that will slice a cigarette in two but leave your finger intact.

Others, who know that few tricksters and literary shysters can hang around for better than twenty-five years, publishing fiction which has steadily broadened its area of inquiry and which has never declined in its energy, know that Harlan is no trick. They may begrudge him that apparently inexhaustible energy, or resent his
chutzpah,
or fear his refusal to suffer fools (of some people it is said they will not suffer fools gladly; Harlan does not suffer them at all), but they know it isn’t a trick.

The book which follows is a case in point. I’m not going to pre-chew it; if you want someone to chew your food for you, send this book back to the publisher, get a refund, and go buy a few volumes of Cliff’s Notes, the mental babyfood of college students everywhere for the last forty years or so. You won’t find one on Harlan, and I hope you never will (and speaking of wills, why not put it in yours, Harlan?
NO FUCKING CLIFF’S NOTES! IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT GOES ON IN
DEATHBIRD STORIES,
GO READ A COPY, YOU FUCKING MENTAL MIDGET!” God,
I sound like Harlan today-don’t you think so?). Certainly you won’t find a Harlan-Ellison-in-a-nutshell in this introduction.

But I
will
point out that these stories and essays range from almost Lovecraftian horror (“Final Trophy”) to existentialist fantasy (“The Cheese Stands Alone,” with its almost talismanic repetition of the phrase “My fine stock”) to the riotously funny (take your pick; my own favorite—maybe because it’s gifted with a title that even Fredric Brown would have admired—”Djinn, No Chaser”) to good old nuts-and-bolts science fiction (“Invulnerable”).

The essays have a similar range; Harlan’s essay on the Saturn fly-by of the Voyager I bird could fit comfortably into an issue of
Atlantic Monthly,
while one can almost see “The 3 Most Important Things in Life” as a stand-up comedy routine (it’s a job, by the way, that Harlan knows, having done it for a while in his flaming youth).

Harlan’s wit, insight, and energy inform all of these stories and essays. Are they uneven? Yes, of course they are. While I haven’t been given the “lawyer’s page”—that is, the dates of copyright on each short story and essay, along with where each was previously published—just the Xerox offprints I’ve been sent suggest that there is also a wide range of time represented in
STALKING THE NIGHTMARE.
Different typefaces and different return addresses tell part of the tale; the evolution in style tells part of it; the growth of confidence and ambition tells much more of it.